… the great intellectual, the great administrator, the great orator lacked one quality essential—at any rate in the conditions of the Russian Revolution—to the great political leader. Trotsky could fire masses of men to acclaim and follow him. But he had no talent for leadership among equals. He could not establish his authority among colleagues by the modest arts of persuasion or by sympathetic attention to the views of men of lesser intellectual calibre than himself. He did not suffer fools, and he was accused of being unable to brook rivals.14
His hold on Party workers was dependent on great gestures and great speeches. A listener remarks:
But as soon as he [Trotsky] had finished he left the hall. There was no personal contact in the corridors. This aloofness, I believe, may partly explain Trotsky’s inability as well as his unwillingness to build a large personal following among the rank and file of the Party. Against the intrigues of Party leaders, which were soon to multiply, Trotsky fought only with the weapons he knew how to use: his pen and his oratory. And even these weapons he took up only when it was too late.15
Above all, Trotsky’s self-dramatization, his conviction that he would triumph by mere personal superiority, without having to condescend to unspectacular political actions, was fatal. A devastating comment from an experienced revolutionary sums it up: “Trotsky, an excellent speaker, brilliant stylist and skilled polemicist, a man cultured and of excellent intelligence, was deficient in only one quality: a sense of reality.”16
Stalin left the fiercest attacks on Trotsky to his allies. He insistently preached moderation. When Zinoviev and Kamenev urged the expulsion of Trotsky from the Party, he opposed it. He said that no one could possibly “conceive of the work of the Political Bureau … without the most active participation of Comrade Trotsky.”17 But his actions were far more effective than his allies’ words. His Secretariat organized the dispersal of Trotsky’s leading supporters. Rakovsky was sent to the Soviet Legation in London, Krestinsky on a diplomatic mission to Germany, others to similar exile. By these and similar means, Trotsky was isolated and outmaneuvered with little trouble. His views, which had already been in conflict with those of Lenin, were officially condemned, and by 1925 it was possible to remove him from the War Commissariat.
Stalin now turned on his erstwhile allies Zinoviev and Kamenev. Only to a lesser degree than Trotsky himself they were to be pivotal to the Great Purge.
It is hard to find anyone who writes of Zinoviev in other than a hostile fashion. He seems to have impressed oppositionists and Stalinists, Communists and non-Communists, as a vain, incompetent, insolent, and cowardly nonentity. Except for Stalin himself, he is the only Bolshevik leader who cannot be called an intellectual. But, at the same time, he had no political sense either. He had no understanding of economic problems. He was a very effective orator, but his speeches lacked substance and were only temporarily effective in rousing mass audiences. And yet this was the man who was for a time the leading figure in the Soviet State just before and after Lenin’s death. He owed his position simply to the fact that he had been one of the most useful amanuenses and hangers-on of Lenin (often a poor judge of men) during the period from 1909 to 1917—in fact, his closest collaborator and pupil. Just before, and for some time after, the October Revolution, he often opposed what he thought to be the risks in Lenin’s policies, on occasion resigning his posts. But he always came back with apologies. And from 1918 on, he had again followed Lenin loyally.
Lenin is said to have complained, “He copies my faults”;18 nevertheless, he had forgiven him his weakness in 1917, and relied on him heavily in important posts. He had also said that Zinoviev was bold when danger was past.19 “Panic personified” was Sverdlov’s comment.20 Yet Zinoviev had worked in the underground until joining Lenin abroad in 1908, and his conduct in opposition to Stalin (including long spells in jail), though neither firm nor reasonable, was not pure cowardice. With all his faults, he did at least make a serious bid for power, which is more than can be said for either Trotsky or Bukharin. He built up his Leningrad fief, and he and Kamenev exerted all their capacities to defeat Stalin. But perhaps the best thing to be said in Zinoviev’s favor is that Kamenev, a more reputable figure, worked loyally with him for many years, and in fact right up to the time of their execution.
Like Stalin, Kamenev had lived in Tbilisi as a boy, and had gone from the Tbilisi Gymnasium to be a law student in Moscow. He was again in Tbilisi, representing the Party, in the early years of the century, when Stalin was barely known. He had been in the Butyrka jail when a student. After his underground work, he had stayed abroad between 1908 and 1914 as Lenin’s closest collaborator after Zinoviev. He did not follow Lenin quite so closely as Zinoviev did, but worked for compromise with the Mensheviks and later, in Russia, dissociated himself from Lenin’s defeatism in the First World War. After the February Revolution in 1917, he came back from exile in Siberia with Stalin, and they launched a program of support for the Provisional Government. When Lenin returned and insisted on a more revolutionary attitude, Kamenev alone continued to resist this view. In October 1917 he joined Zinoviev in opposing the seizure of power, attracting Lenin’s violent, though temporary, rage. From 1918 on, he stuck to the Party line. He was not ambitious and was always inclined to moderation. In any case, he had neither the will power nor the judgment to compete adequately in the new phase.
Zinoviev and Kamenev had no truly outstanding adherents, but their following nevertheless included men like Lashevich (Vice Commissar for War, who was later to die before the Purges), G. E. Evdokimov (Secretary of the Central Committee), and a number of other powerful figures. Moreover, Zinoviev still controlled the Leningrad Party, and it voted solidly against Stalin’s majority. There was thus the curious sight of the organizations of the Party “representing” the workers of Leningrad and of Moscow respectively passing unanimously resolutions condemning each other. “What,” Trotsky asked ironically, “was the social explanation?”21
Once again, Stalin was able to appear the moderate. He represented Zinoviev and Kamenev as wanting to destroy the majority. In passages which were to require much amendment in later editions of his Works, he asked, “You demand Bukharin’s blood? We won’t give you his blood.” And again: “The Party was to be led without Rykov, without Kalinin, without Tomsky, without Molotov, without Bukharin…. The Party cannot be led without the aid of those comrades I have just named.”22
Defeated, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had been particularly strong against Trotsky, now turned to him for support, forming “the United Opposition.” This involved their accepting the left-wing line on economic policy, and it automatically ranged against them the followers of Lenin’s line, in particular Bukharin and his supporters. By 1926, as Souvarine remarks, Trotsky had “more or less already handed Stalin the dictatorship by his lack of foresight, his tactic of patient waiting broken by sudden and inconsequent reactions, and his mistaken calculations,” but his final mistake was the forming of this bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev, “men devoid of character or credit who had nothing concrete to offer to offset the disrepute they brought with them.”23 Trotsky did not understand what the Party now was or the nature of the problem he faced.
In April 1926, Evdokimov, the only Zinovievite on the Secretariat, was removed. In July, Zinoviev was expelled from the Politburo, being replaced by the Stalinist Rudzutak; and in October, Trotsky and Kamenev were expelled in turn. In October, the opposition submitted. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, and Evdokimov denounced their own offenses,24 a most striking precedent for the long series of self-denunciations by the oppositionists.